Today's Stories

September 25-7, 2009

Daniel Wolff
Speculating on Education

David Michael Green
Dumping Dubya

Ramzy Baroud
The Goldstone Report and Israeli Impunity

September 24, 2009

Steven Higgs
Even in Indiana, Doctors Support National Health Insurance

Christopher Brauchli
Death Pays

Marshall Auerback
The Shortfall at the FDIC

Stephanie Westbrook
Italy's Fallen Soldiers

Nadia Hijab
Know Your Dictator

Sen. Russell Feingold
Fixing the Patriot Act, Restoring the Constitution

David Macaray
Goodbye "Norma Rae"

Binoy Kampmark
Curry Bashings in Oz

Joe Allen
Dancing With the Hammer

Website of the Day
The Most Corrupt Members of Congress

September 23, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
The Economy is a Lie, Too

Gabriel Kolko
The United States in Afghanistan: Eight Years Later

Uri Avnery
The Waldorf-Astoria Summit

Shamus Cooke
The First Shots of the Trade War

Missy Beattie
The Sound of Money

Gareth Porter
Taliban Rising

Mark Weisbrot
How Much Repression Will Hillary Clinton Support in Honduras?

Dr. Susan Block
The Murder of Annie Le

Norm Kent
Pot and the Right to Pursue Happiness

Richard Neville
Apocalypse Porno

Website of the Day
In Carver Country

September 22, 2009

Franklin C. Spinney The Huge Hole in Gen. McChrystal's Afghan Counterinsurgency Strategy

Russell Mokhiber
Who's the Pimp?

Greg Grandin
Zelaya's Brazilian Gambit

Nikolas Kozloff
Salvaging Democracy in Honduras Will Be Tricky

John Ross
Mexico Convulsed by Paranoia

Ron Jacobs
Gen. McChrystal's Salespitch

Tariq Ali
The Afghan Folly

Dave Lindorff
NYT Trashes Single-Payer

Harvey Wasserman
Tom Friedman's Idiocy Atomique

Vijay Prashad
Is Anything Better Than Nothing?

Kareem Shora
After the CIA Torture Report

Website of the Day
Did a State Dept Official Sell Nuclear Secrets?

September 21, 2009

JoAnn Wypijewski
Will Trumka or the Steelworkers Push Labor Into Battle?

Carl Finamore
Backstage at the AFL-CIO Convention

Uri Avnery
Sliming Goldstone and His Report

Nikolas Kozloff
Joe Wilson's Immigration Hypocrisy

Paul Simpson, M.D.
Why Your Doctor May Have PTSD

Alan Nasser
New Deal Liberalism Writes Its Obituary

Ray McGovern
CIA Torturers Running Scared

Dave Lindorff
Thoughts on Saving an Old Barn

Lina Thorne
Women, War and Afghanistan

Jeb Sprague
Confronting the G20

Website of the Day
Petition: Save the Yellowstone Grizzly

September 18-20, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
When Gossip Came Back and Our Modern Age was Born

Russell Mokhiber
Meet the Real Death Panels

Mike Whitney
The Post-Bubble Malaise

David Michael Green
Can America be Salvaged?

Jonathan Cook
Boycott Derails Jerusalem Rail Line

Nadia Hijab
Sinking the Goldstone Report

Mark Weisbrot
Recession, Recovery and Reform: Will Anything Change?

Michael Winship
Let's Make a Deal, Beltway Edition

Michael Leonardi
The Nuclear Dump in the Mediterranean Sea

Andy Worthington
The Kuwaiti Who Met Bin Laden

Fred Gardner
The Prohibitionists' Manifesto

David Macaray
What Happens in Congress Stays in Congress

David Rosen
System Failure and the Garrido Case

Jason Mark
Hacking the Sky

Mike Ferner
In Praise of Senator Baucus

Farzana Versey
The Great Indian Rope Trick

Ron Jacobs
Dr. Guillotin and Dr. Faustus: an Interview with Marc Estrin

elin o'Hara slavick
Flags for Hiroshima: Artist's Statement

Gilad Aztmon
Vengeance, Barbarism and Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds

David Yearsley
Mendelssohn as Organ Maestro

Charles R. Larson
Darkness, Dignity and Hope in Liberia

Lorenzo Wolff
Dialing Up The Clash

Website of the Weekend
Meet Your Conservative Movement

September 17, 2009

Joshua Frank
Max Baucus: the Slick Swindler

Brenda Norrell
Cry Me a River: Uranium and Genocide in Indian Country

Robert Weissman
The Financial Crisis, One Year Later

Pam Martens
The Filmmakers vs. the Capitalists

Franklin Lamb
Palestinian Camps Are Ready to Erupt

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Cuban Five: An Insult to Humanity

Jed Bickman
Drone War Over Pakistan

Alan Farago
The Mayor of Coconut Creek Gets Butterflies

Website of the Day
C.R.O.C.

September 16, 2009

Ray McGovern
Torture and Accountability

Stephen Green
America's Strange Health Care Debate

Andy Worthington
Is Bagram Obama's New Secret Prison?

Dean Baker
Short Sellers: the Unsung Heroes of the Financial Crisis

Anthony DiMaggio
Killing the Messenger

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Cuban Five: The Unheard Call

Benjamin Dangl
Justice Follows Direct Action

Robin Willoughby
The World Seed Conference: Good for Farmers?

Eric Walberg
EuroPeace, the Sounds of Silence

James Ridgeway
Bring That "Boy" Down

Website of the Day
Baucus' Bogus Bill

September 15, 2009

Mike Whitney
The Real Lesson of Lehman's Fall

Mutadhar al-Zaidi
The Story of My Shoe

Marshall Auerback
Government Spending is the Solution--Not the Problem

Afshin Rattansi
The Deal That Led to the Srebrenica Massacre: Former UN Spokeswoman Fingers Holbrooke and the Clinton Administration

Jonathan Cook
How US Tax Breaks Fund Israeli Settlers

Gareth Porter:
Niger Redux? IAEA Conceals Evidence Iran Nuke Docs Were Forged

Dave Lindorff
Congress Needs More Catcalls

Winslow T. Wheeler
Obama and Pentagon Pork

Franklin Spinney
Bin Laden's Latest Message and the Nuttiness of the War on Terror

Karen Korenoski /
Michael Yates
Up in Wood Smoke: Boulder's Dirty Little Secret

David Macaray
Government Cheese

Susie Day
President Mao-bama's Little Red Primer

Website of the Day
The Cotton Pickin' Truth: the Persistance of Slavery in Mississippi

September 14, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
The Health Care Deceit

M. G. Piety
The Danes Do It (Health Care) Better

Shamus Cooke
Wall Street Under Obama: Bigger and Riskier

Bouthaina Shaaban
Three Faces and a Homeland

Alvaro Huerta
In Defense of the Undocumented: Immigrants and Health Care

John Ross
Mexico Loses Its History

Harvey Wasserman
The Supreme Court and Corporate Money

Adam Federman
The Plight of the Bumblebee

Stephen Fleischman
The Federal Twist

Robert Jensen
Can Journalism Schools be Relevant in a World on the Brink?

Website of the Day
The Origin of Sex Offender Registries

September 11-13, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Obama's Big Speech: Math Trumps Rhetoric

JoAnn Wypijewski
Trumka Takes Over AFL-CIO

Carl Ginsburg
The Patient as Profit Center

Leonard Peltier
I am Barack Obama's Political Prisoner Now

Franklin Lamb
Ted Kennedy's Changing Take on Israel

Benjamin Dangl
Throwing Bullets at Failed Policies

Mike Whitney
How to Fight Deflation

John Berger
In Search of Antonello

Saul Landau
Watergate and Modern Scandals

Russell Mokhiber
Disgraceful Democrats

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Pryor's Judgment

Felice Pace
NPR's Linda Gradstein Has Done It Again on Gaza

Jordan Flaherty
The Battle Over Discriminatory Housing Laws in New Orleans

Ron Jacobs
It's Time to be Impolite About Afghanistan

David Macaray
The Utility of Boycotts

David Correia
Welcome to the Business-Friendly Carpenter's Union

Robert Bryce
Wind Turbines and Bird Kills

Christopher Brauchli
Defenders of the Classroom

Paul Krassner
Aha! A Few Words About the 9/11 Truth Movement

Charles R. Larson
Deracination

Kim Nicolini
"Extract:" An Exercise in Economic Realism

David Yearsley
Tall Buildings: the Sound and the Silence

Lorenzo Wolff
In Defense of the One Hit Wonder

Poets' Basement
McEnteer and Corseri

Website of the Weekend
Pizarchik: the Wrong Choice

September 10, 2009

Joshua Frank
Inside Hanford's B Reactor: a Tour of the World's Most Toxic Nuclear Site

Dean Baker
Bernanke's Bad Money

Brian M. Downing
The State of U.S. National Security

Franklin C. Spinney
Portrait of an Afghan Firefight: Up Close and Personal

Andy Worthington
No Escape From Guantánamo

Chase Madar
Samantha Power and the Weaponization of Human Rights

Farzana Versey
A Tale of Two Slums

Ronnie Cummins
Whole Foods, Fair Trade and Organics

Binoy Kampmark
Health Care, Obama and the System

Timothy Lebrón
The Conservative Case for Health Care Reform

Charles R. Larson
A Solution to the Health Care Dilemma

Website of the Day
The Debtor's Revolt Begins!

September 9, 2009

Richard Neville
Trigger-Happy in Afghanistan

Melissa Checker
Double Jeopardy: Carbon Offsets and Human Rights Abuses

Nadia Hijab
Settling for ... Settlements?

Robert Weissman
The Stakes at the Supreme Court

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Arabs Call for General Strike

Russell Mokhiber
Pollan, Mackey, Whole Foods and Single Payer

James Ridgeway
The Dotty Factor: Will Demented Geezers Wreck the Economy?

Richard W. Behan
Obama's Imperative in Afghanistan

James McEnteer
The Photo and the Secretary: How to Appall Robert Gates

Martha Rosenberg
Hatchery Horrors

Website of the Day
Belmondo Verité

September 8, 2009

Henry A. Giroux
The Corporate Stranglehold on Education

Stephen Soldz
Psychologist Accused of War Crimes Opposes Investigations

John Ross
Rituals of the Absurd

Jeff Leys
Health Care vs. Warfare: the Future of the Afghan War

Mike Whitney Ashcroft: Repugnant to the Constitution

Shamus Cooke
Obama's Empty Labor Day Speech

Ellen Brown
Did Lehman Brothers Fall or Was It Pushed?

Norman Solomon Men With Guns: In Kabul and Washington

Deepak Tripathi
The Axis of Evil and the Great Satan

Laray Polk
Personality Cults, Indoctrination and Inculcation

Charles R. Larson
Just Who Does He Think He Is?

Website of the Day
The President is Not a Guidance Counselor

September 7, 2009

Vicente Navarro
Obama's Mistakes in Health Care Reform

Bouthaina Shaaban
In Praise of Admiral Mullen

David Macaray
Obama's Labor Day Report Card

Paul Craig Roberts
Indefensible Nation

Jonathan Cook
Israeli Ads Warn Against Marrying Non-Jews

Conn Hallinan
Brazil Flexes Its Muscles

Walter Brasch
The Origins of Labor Day, the Unknown Holiday

Mark Weisbrot
IMF Gives Honduran Government $175 Million

Carl Finamore
China's Birthday Stimulation

C. G. Estabrook
Advance Text of Obama's Big Speech

Website of the Day
One Down, 20,000 to Go

September 4-6, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Deeper Into the Tunnel

Carl Ginsburg
Saving New Orleans' Charity Hospital

Jonathan Cook
The Missing Link in Israeli Organ Theft?

George Wuerthner
The Unintended Consequences of Wolf Hunting

Marc Levy
The Bling They Curse and Carry

Ray McGovern
Holbrooke's Afghan Benchmark

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
It Happened in Miami

Joe Paff
Organizing the Mission

Gareth Porter
Taliban's Tank-Killing Bombs Came From CIA, Not Iran

Devin Beaulieu
Scaremongering About Bolivia and Islam

Anthony Papa
Why Leslie Crocker Snyder Should Not Become New York City's New DA

David Ker Thomson
Love and Dekes in Utopia

Don Fitz
The Case of the Biodevastation 7: What the Police Won't Apologize For

Lee Sustar /
S. Sepehri
The Fallout From Iran's Elections

Jim Goodman
Why Honor Organized Labor?

Wajahat Ali
Domestic Crusaders: Making Muslim American Theater

Ron Jacobs
Agitator Journalism: Remembering Ramparts

Helen Redmond
The Lion Sleeps Tonight: the Crimes and Misdemeanors of Teddy Kennedy

John V. Walsh
Obama to Cindy Sheehan: Get Lost

Charles R. Larson
Mandanipour's Masterpiece: Censoring an Iranian Love Story

Mark Scaramella
Ho-Bleeping-Hum: a Few Well-Chosen Words About Valerie Plame's Book

David Yearsley
Cameron Carpenter's Amazing Organ Transplants

Ben Sonnenberg
Hooking, Breaking Friendships, Cross-Dressing and, Above All, Delphine Seyrig

Poets' Basement
Davies, Orloski and Bready

Website of the Weekend
Architectural Semiotics with Glenn Beck

September 3, 2009

Marcus Rediker
Inside Auburn Prison

Ron Jacobs
Embedded With the Taliban

Mike Whitney
How Bad Will It Get?

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada
Untold Story of the Cuban Five: Indictment À La Carte

Saul Landau
Moby Dick and Asian Typhoons

Anat Matar
Israeli Academics Must Pay a Price to End Occupation

Tanya Golash-Boza
How Immigration Enforcement is Weakening National Security

Dave Lindorff
Which Side Are You On?

Andy Worthington
The Story of Gitmo's Two Syrians

Website of the Day
Plundering Appalachia

September 2, 2009

John Ross
Mexico's Plagues

Vijay Prashad
Hey Ram, the Things the Financial Times Group Does!

Rev. Jim Rigby
Why is Universal Health Care "Un-American"?

Joanne Mariner
What the Inspector General Found

Missy Beattie
Hejira: At Martha's Vineyard with Cindy Sheehan

Soren Ambrose
Multilateral Money

Diane Farsetta
Water: the Newest Wave of Corporate "Social Responsibility"

Nadia Hijab
Mulling Mullen's Message

Shamus Cooke
How to Lower the Deficit Without Killing Social Security

Charles R. Larson
Is Dick Cheney Running Scared?

Website of the Day
Inside the Egg Hatchery

September 1, 2009

Jeffrey St. Clair
The Wolf at Trout Creek

Paul Craig Roberts
Why Not Sanctions for Israel?

Mark T. Harris
The Whole Foods Boycott: It's About More Than CEO Hypocrisy

Dean Baker
Bank Profits Are Up: Did You Hear Anyone Say, "Thank You"?

Jeffrey Buchanan
Ending the Human Rights Crisis in KatrinaRitaVille

Robin Mittenthal
A Sea of Monocrops: Old MacDonald Never Had a Farm Like This

Ellen Brown
Mercury Mischief

Martha Rosenberg
Vytorin Marketing is Back

Website of the Day
Crazy Town Hall Protester Interviews

Weekend Edition
September 25-7, 2009

A Review of Lorna's Silence

Hardcore Capitalism

By KIM NICOLINI

Lorna’s Silence, Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s latest Belgian-Eye-View of life under Capitalism, is an uncompromisingly realistic picture of a cannibalistic economy in which the female body and humanity in general are so much disposable merchandise in the grip of economic interests. Focused on the story of Lorna, a young Albanian woman who participates in a Marriage-For-Sale scheme to obtain Belgian citizenship, the film is a relentlessly hardcore look at how this young woman navigates her body as a survival mechanism in a viciously brutal economy.  A kind of prostitution narrative, Lorna’s Silence is relentlessly hardcore, but not does not fall prey to the usual hyper-melodramatics found in prostitution narratives. Instead it shows us the matter-of-fact oppression of global capitalism that only allows liberation in madness. The movie asks us to participate in Lorna’s tense journey, but it refuses to provide us any kind of romantic hook. The film is a grim and ugly view of reality that shows that it is only in madness that Lorna can escape her oppressive circumstances. But don’t let the film’s bleak realism fool you. Despite its seemingly bare-bones approach, Lorna’s Silence is actually a meticulously constructed film that builds through layers of image, sound, and body. It is as tightly constructed as a visual poem, and the layers of its construction build and unfold until it leads us to a destination where the madness of the mind becomes an escape from the madness of capitalism.  

From the opening scene, there is no doubt that this movie is about a cash economy. The very first shot of Lorna is of her hands counting out cash to a bank. She pays cash to make phone calls, cash to buy medicine. She negotiates a cash relationship with her paid husband Claudy, the two of them constantly exchanging Claudy’s envelope of cash back and forth. She needs cash to solidify her plans to open a café with Sokol, the man she wants to marry for love instead of cash.  She negotiates cash transactions with the economic opportunist and Marriage-For-Sale marketer (a.k.a. pimp) Fabio. She is offered cash to be silent and offered cash to sell her body.  She goes to the bank and counts out more cash to secure a loan. We see cash counted into registers, counted into envelopes, shoved into pockets, stuffed into car vents. Lorna is constantly locking cash in drawers and lockers, stashing cash, exchanging cash. Cash is everywhere in this movie from the very beginning to the very end, and Lorna’s body is right in the middle of it.

Every single relationship between Lorna and the men in the movie is cash-based.  Claudy is paid by the mob to marry Lorna. Fabio and the Russian are paying Lorna to marry him. And it turns out that even Sokol, the man Lorna really wants to marry, is more interested in his cash investment than Lorna herself:  he demands a return of his investment when Lorna fails to secure the marriage to the Russian. The bank takes its cash penalty when Lorna can’t pay for the loan. In one of the final scenes, Fabio, Sokol, and Lorna negotiate how much cash Lorna needs to return to them for failing to meet her contract. Lorna counts out cash and passes it to the men, her envelope growing thinner with each bill that she counts out.  We are made acutely aware of what remaining cash Lorna possesses. She has been reduced from a woman with dreams of securing enough cash to buy her own business, to a near penniless disposable female body.

When Fabio sends Lorna off with henchman Spirou to dispose of Lorna’s body (e.g. kill her), she attempts to negotiate an escape by grabbing her purse (that contains her cash as we were just shown in detail) and going to the bathroom. Spirou grabs the purse and demands that she leave it in the car. When Lorna returns a few minutes later, bashes Spirou’s head in with a rock, and flees, she leaves the purse that she tried to bring with her just moments before. She leaves her cash, and runs into the woods. At first, I questioned how she could do something so careless and forget her purse (since we were just shown that she wanted to take her purse), but then as Lorna flees into the woods and the literal wilderness of her madness, I realized that the Dardennes set that scene up intentionally. Lorna leaves the purse because she no longer has a need for cash. She leaves the purse, and in that act she liberates herself from the cash economy that binds her, and she descends into the freedom of her interior madness. She has to leave the purse to be free.

The purse is just one instance of many carefully constructed moments in the film. The Dardennes are known for the lack of scores in their films. Music isn’t used to help filter the narrative. There is only reality, and the reality is often oppressively realistic and unrelentingly ugly. Such is the case with the opening scenes of Lorna’s Silence. In those first few scenes, all we experience is noise, confusion, tension and a kind of banal ugliness as Lorna negotiates banks, shops, and her fraught relationship with Claudy in their dreary apartment. After a seemingly endless depressing scene between Lorna and Claudy, Lorna finally closes the door to her bedroom – locking her wallet and cash in a drawer – and climbs into bed. Music rises from within the film, and for a moment we as the audience relax and think there is going to be some relief, that something in the film is going to soften up a bit, that we can maybe breathe for a moment. But the music suddenly gets louder and distorted, making us realize that it’s coming from within the apartment. It is Claudy, the junkie husband, blaring his music, and Lorna gets out of bed and shouts at him to turn it down. So the music is not a source of relief, but a source of further tension. It is not coming from some kind of omniscient narration providing momentary relief from the gritty relentlessness of reality within the film. It is part of that reality.

There are only three other instances of music in the film. In one scene, Sokol and Lorna decide to celebrate securing the place for their café, so they go to a bar, have a couple of beers and dance. The weird thing is that they dance to American country western music, which is really disorienting. The scene seems maddeningly hectic and out-of-control as the country music blares and Lorna spins through the hurricane of the moment. The American music is like the stamp of the world economy and global capitalism on the scene.  The next music comes when Lorna is dancing with the Russian she is supposed to marry. Romantic music plays in the background as Lorna and this man circle on the dance floor. Lorna’s body is rigid and fraught with the tension between what she wants to feel inside herself and the utter lack of feeling in the transaction-based relationship with the Russian. Likewise, the Russian holds her like he’s holding a briefcase or stick of wood. 

The music enters each scene so dramatically that I couldn’t help but note how the Dardennes were using it. Other than these three scenes, the movie is scored with the noise of urban life, traffic, people talking, heels on sidewalks, the steam of the dry cleaners, arguments and negotiations.  There is a lot of noise, but very little music, until the very end of the film. In the very final scene, Lorna lies her body down on a bench in an abandoned cabin in the woods, and a few strains of beautiful music rise from outside the boundaries of the film’s reality. There is no denying that this music is coming from somewhere beyond the “reality” of the film. Its presence is unreal and phenomenally beautiful in the few notes that it inserts into the scene. It is the first and only instant of non-diegetic sound, and it is the marker that Lorna’s liberation is complete. She is no longer beholden to the contract of reality and its economics. She now rests peacefully in the wilderness of her madness where music can seep in from outside the borders. When the music carries through to the final credits rolling on the screen, we feel a tremendous sadness and an enormous relief that we, along with Lorna, are free from the world we witnessed in the first  95 minutes of the film.

Speaking of sound, the movie is called Lorna’s Silence, so the first thing I have to ask myself is what is Lorna’s silence? Lorna is a free agent who uses her body to survive. She is a self-determined young woman who tries to hold onto a fragment of a dream while she is entangled in economic forces that prove to be more powerful than her determination to transcend her economic boundaries. Lorna’s silence is the silence that she imposes on her emotions and her feelings so she can navigate her way through a world where her body is a tool for economic transaction. Her silence is the distance that she has to put between herself and her body to survive. Her silence is the silence she imposes on herself as she exploits her body to try to gain some kind of economic footing, as she prostitutes her body and sells it for marriage and citizenship, as she literally beats her body against walls to try to escape the poison of the system that owns her body. We see Lorna’s body standing silent, the emotion locked inside her entire physical form as she navigates her way through a cash economy where her body is so much barter. Lorna’s silence is written into every inch of her body as she lies in bed trying to shut out the presence of Claudy, her paid junkie husband. Her silence is written into her hands as she dances with the Russian mob boss who wants to pay her to marry him. It is written into her body as she bashes her own head into a window frame to try to get a quick divorce. It’s written into her body as she irons shirts at the laundry where she works, as she runs through streets, up stairs, into rooms, and flees into the woods.

It is when Lorna breaks her silence within herself and uses her body for compassion rather than transaction that she begins her spiral into madness. Lorna is a person who makes choices to survive. She chooses to use her body to gain citizenship and to be pimped by Fabio and his Marriage-For-Sale business. She chooses to marry the disposable junkie Claudy to help her facilitate her economic dream. She chooses to lock away her emotions in relation to Claudy and see him as a tool to use to achieve her goal. But when Lorna finds out that Fabio plans to have Claudy killed via a lethal overdose of heroin and when Claudy asks Lorna to help him get clean, Lorna’s silence begins to break. Emotion and a sense of human responsibility leak from inside her, and in a moment of desperate compassion she undresses her body and offers it to Claudy to help him not use heroin. It should be noted that it was Lorna’s silence, her exaltation over being granted a divorce and her choosing to contact the Russian instead of celebrating Claudy’s sobriety, that led Claudy to want to use in the first place. When Lorna strips her clothes and offers her naked body to Claudy, there is no romance or eroticism in the act. It is simply two desperate people joining bodies as another kind of survival. Of course, both Lorna and Claudy are prostitutes to the system, so when they join their naked bodies in a sex act, it is more the embodiment of desperation than anything sexual. Their bodies join together naked in the glaring light of their dreary apartment, and they are in a way the same body.  It is at this point that Lorna’s silence is truly broken.

As it turns out, even through her act of compassion and by breaking her silence, Lorna can not save Claudy because the economic forces in control of her body and Claudy’s are more powerful than Lorna’s compassion.  The mob kills Claudy, and Lorna slips into a new kind of silence. The silence of her madness. In a desperate attempt to try to reclaim her body which has been brutally corrupted by a cannibalistic economic system, Lorna manufactures a phantom pregnancy resulting from her sex act with Claudy. She creates life where the economic system has manufactured death. Through the phantom pregnancy and her literal escape into the woods, Lorna silences the demons of the cash economy that consumed her body and reconciles her relationship to her body in a kind of natural (though mad) pre-economic state.  It should be noted that prior to Lorna’s escape into the literal and emotional wilderness that there is no nature in this movie. The entire movie is populated by people, urban life, and a man-made environment. There is one glimpse of a potted plant in Lorna’s apartment that is so stark in its pot that it looks artificial, a kind of desperate attempt to put nature in an unnatural world. Likewise, when Lorna visits the building where she wants to have her café, she marvels over the garden, but we never see the garden. All we see are dirty windows with a hint of light streaming in. The garden is never a reality. So at the end of the movie, when Lorna leaves her purse and her cash, flees into the woods, talks to her phantom baby, and falls asleep to the strains of music seeping in from somewhere in the beyond, it is only then, in her complete internal madness, that she escapes the external madness of capitalism and its control over her body.

We have gone on this journey with Lorna, and we tangibly feel her release, as pathetic and tragic as it is. The movie is so meticulously constructed that when we arrive at this final point, we accept and embrace the artificiality of madness over the reality that preceded it. Yes, Lorna’s Silence is a prostitution narrative, but it is about the prostitution that is epidemic under global capitalism, a system where human lives are so much merchandise to be used and disposed of according to the economic forces that drive it. Compared to the madness of this economic system, Lorna’s madness looks like a refreshing breath of sanity.

Kim Nicolini is an artist, poet and cultural critic. She lives in Tucson, Arizona with her daughter and a menagerie of beasts. Her work has appeared in Punk Planet, Berkeley Poetry Review, Bad Subjects, and Bullhorn. She is currently finishing a book-length essayistic memoir about being a teenage runaway in 1970s San Francisco. She can be reached at: knicolini@gmail.com.

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